Woodstock’s stalled-before-it-started 50th anniversary celebration has taken over much of the news cycle this summer, but some of us haven’t forgotten the disaster that was Woodstock ’99, which kicked off its main stage 20 years ago today.

The planned 30th anniversary of the most famous music festival in history started with good intentions, but quickly descended into chaos as an angst-ridden generation was pushed to the limit.

Back in 1999, I was a production associate for the MTV Radio Network, a syndicated radio news outlet. Woodstock ’99 was the first music festival I covered as a radio reporter and budding journalist. I went with a team of three co-workers, who are to this day still close friends (twenty years later we still joke that we smell like fire). I also worked with members of the MTV News team throughout the weekend sharing content, stories and news to help bolster our coverage of the event.

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The festival was held at the decommissioned Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. It coincided with an oppressive heat wave that saw temps near 100 degrees each day. With little shade from the sun, long lines for water fountains and a hefty price tag of $4 for a bottle of water and $12 for a personal pizza, fans began to lose their patience soon after the gates opened. Promoters were clearly using the “Woodstock” brand to fleece the hundreds of thousands of people, who paid $150 per ticket.

As a credentialed journalist, I had access to water and somewhat clean bathrooms backstage, but outside the press tent there was little escape from the blazing sun. Everyone on site battled heat stroke, dehydration and sheer exhaustion.

The first day of the event was considered a “Pre-show” with the likes of The String Cheese Incident, Vertical Horizon, G. Love and Special Sauce and 3rd Bass performing only on the West Stage and the Emerging Artists stage. The main stage wouldn’t host an act until day two.

The second day of the festival was fairly uneventful as ’90s bands like Lit, Buckcherry, Insane Clown Posse, Jamiroquai, Live, The Offspring and Bush performed. Korn was at the height of its popularity at the time and delivered an incredible set, which the band calls its best show ever.

As night two turned into day three, things took a dark turn. Garbage and plastic bottles piled up all over the grounds and the portable toilets were already approaching unusable. Large mud pits began to emerge from frustrated knuckleheads destroying free water fountains. For fans, the overwhelming heat, and making the mile-plus walk on the tarmac from the East stage to the smaller West stage, started to take its toll.

Kid Rock tapped into the crowd’s frustration over the conditions and high prices during his early afternoon set. Towards the end of his final song “3 Sheets to the Wind (What’s My Name),” Rock told the unruly crowd: “Now when we kick this beat in for the last time, I want to see every possible thing flying through the f–ing air, but nothing that can hurt each other. Plastic bottles, let’s have some fucking fun.” When the band kicked in plastic bottles began flying above the crowd. It looked amazing from afar, but not a lot of fun to be in the crowd or on stage when being pelted with bottles. As the plastic piled up into a mound, Kid Rock and his Twisted Brown Trucker Band left the stage pretty quickly.

Wyclef Jean, Dave Matthews Band and Alanis Morissette followed Kid Rock, before the head-banging trifecta of Limp Bizkit, Rage Against The Machine and Metallica closed the East stage on Saturday night.

In July 1999 Limp Bizkit had the No. 1 album in the country with “Significant Other.” Along with Korn, the group was taking turns with Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys for the top spot on MTV’s daily countdown show “Total Request Live.” When the hard rock took the stage, I was standing on a platform on a production tower with some fellow MTVers and talent including Chris Connolly (who earlier in the day was berated by a fan live on MTV about how the channel played too many BSB videos). The sheer size of the crowd — more than 200,000 reportedly attended — was breathtaking. I’d never seen that many people in one place before or since.

We were just to the left of the main soundboard and lighting controls. About halfway through their set, Bizkit covered Ministry’s “Thieves.” It was then that fans began to tear sheets of plywood off of the many delay and production towers scattered across the former Air Force Base. By the time they launched into the next song “Stuck,” there were sheets of plywood being passed over the crowd and fans began dangerously climbing up and surfing and jumping off back into the masses. When the group finished “Stuck,” Durst actually tried to calm down the audience saying, “Mellow out you insane crazy motherf–ers.”

CREDIT: Stephen Chernin/AP/Shutterstock

Once they launched into “Break Stuff,” things got worse. The crowd was so riled up that people used tarps as makeshift trampolines propelling people incredibly high in the air as others stood and jumped off the many pieces of plywood floating through the audience. It was around this time our delay tower began shaking as we were pelted by an endless barrage of plastic bottles. Following Kid Rock’s lead earlier, fans learned the bottles flew further with more liquid inside. I remember being hit in the head with a half-filled bottle of Mountain Dew and thinking it’s time to get out of here. A few minutes later, I got a call on the walkie-talkie for all MTV employees to immediately get out of the crowd and seek safety backstage. There were about eight of us who quickly tucked our all-access passes into our shirts and formed a human chain by holding hands and navigating through the thick crowd while Limp Bizkit was chugging along nearing the end of its set. After we safely made it behind the East stage, friends and co-workers checked on us as if we have survived a war and then I learned about the surge in the number of injured fans seeking medical attention from the violent mosh pits.

During their cover of George Michael’s “Faith” (a radio hit for the band that year), Fred Durst infamously climbed into the audience, stood on a piece of plywood and proceeded to crowd surf on it. The set ended with a fever pitch. After Bizkit walked off there was an announcement from the stage that Woodstock ’99 was getting “a little scary” and that there are “hurt people here amongst you, we have to chill a little bit.” Later we found out about various reports of sexual assault and rapes during Bizkit’s performance. If you watch the band’s set, easily accessible on YouTube, you’ll see many topless women being groped.

CREDIT: Peter R Barber/AP/Shutterstock

We were given the okay to return to the audience for the next band Rage Against The Machine. I assumed the crowd would explode when the band took the stage, but thankfully, I was wrong. Rage played at a much lower volume than Limp Bizkit with such a focused energy that the crowd was nothing like they were an hour or two earlier. I tip my hat to Rage, because they could have incited a riot if they wanted to. I think they knew the weight of the situation and handled it perfectly. However, Bassist Tim Commerford did notoriously burn the American flag that was draped on his amp during their last song, “Killing in the Name,” which would probably cause more backlash today that it did 20 years ago. Metallica closed the East Stage with a 90-minute performance and played a powerful set without much incident.

After the trio of Limp Bizkit, Rage Against The Machine and Metallica on Saturday night, the event closed on Sunday with Elvis Costello, Jewel, Creed and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. While the crowd was a bit sluggish in the morning after two days of stifling heat, things began to go downhill when an anti-violence group called PAX — the non-profit has now changed its name to The Center to Prevent Youth Violence — handed out thousands of candles to fans. The idea was for people to light the candles when the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed “Under The Bridge.” Instead people made elaborate art formations on the ground, others outlined their territory, and eventually some began using them to start small fires. As Woodstock ’99 drew to a close about ten bon fires scattered the landscape and one of the production towers went up in flames, right around the time RHCP launched into its encore, the couldn’t-be-more-poorly-timed cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire.”

While the intention may have been to give a nod to the historic original Woodstock performance of that same song, it instead served as one last nudge. Right after the band walked off the stage we got the call that MTV was evacuating the festival. We immediately went backstage to pack up the equipment and get on the shuttle out of Woodstock. At this point the show was over and traffic leaving was nearly at a standstill. Many of us decided to stand outside the shuttle bus as it inched along, since we all smelled like fire. We watched waves of New York State Police march right by us in full riot gear to quell the crowd. By this time, Woodstock had turned into a complete riot with fans destroying 12 trailers, many vendor tents, delay towers, ATMs and more. We eventually got back to our hotel and went straight to the bar.

CREDIT: Dave Duprey/AP/Shutterstock

When all was said and done 44 people were arrested, four cases of rape were initially reported by the New York State Police, 1,200 people were treated by on-site medical staff and there was millions of dollars worth of damage caused by the destruction.

While Limp Bizkit received a lot of heat afterwards from their crowd-stirring performance, in hindsight they just did what they do at each concert. It was the perfect storm at the height of the popularity of Nu-metal — or active rock, as the radio industry dubbed the genre — combined with the high prices, sanitation issues, lack of clean water, the overwhelming heat and humidity, lax security and the bright idea of candles. The only thing that resembled the original Woodstock, outside of the colorful Peter Max stage art and the topless women that dotted the landscape, were two performers. The late-John Entwistle of The Who played a solo set — strangely on the Emerging Artist Stage — and the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart performed with Planet Drum, ironically at the same time Limp Bizkit was on another stage.

It should be no surprise that the state of Woodstock 50 is in shambles, especially looking back at what happened in 1999. Those who witnessed the degradation and destruction have no interest in another Woodstock. More likely, they’d rather forget it.

The light is quickly fading on Woodstock 50, which in its latest plea to the town of Vernon, New York, was rejected in its effort to secure a permit to hold the three-day concert at Vernon Downs.

The Syracuse area venue with a capacity of 35,000 was the most recent proposed site for the troubled festival, which has been dogged by financial and organizational problems since it was announced in January. An open house was held in advance of a town meeting to determine whether or not the festival’s permit application for the site will be approved. It has already been rejected by the town codes committee twice and been appealed by the festival’s organizers.

The town’s planning committee rendered its denial just after 8:30 p.m. local time and it was unanimous.

The organizers’ plan to hold three day-long concerts — rather than one single-weekend festivals — would see attendees bussed in from parking lots on nearby Routes 5 and 31, according to WUTR-TV. Camping is not part of the plan and area accommodations are scant.

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Says one concert insider: “They could pull off a show for 4,000 to 5,000 people, but not 30,000.” In addition, the festival faces numerous obstacles, not the least of which involves selling tickets in time and building a stage that can handle the complicated productions of its headliners.

Asked earlier on Tuesday what will happen if the festival’s appeal is rejected, Woodstock founder Michael Lang told the Poughkeepsie Journal: “If we don’t get the decision we want, it’s something that we will then have to consider. If it doesn’t work this year, it doesn’t work this year. We’ve tried everything we can. We’ve done our best. We’ll continue to do our best until we find out one way or the other whether it’s going to happen.”

The festival, which is scheduled to feature a blockbuster lineup including Jay-Z, Dead & Co., Miley Cyrus and many others, has been plagued by organizational and financial difficulties since it was announced: The original financial backer, Dentsu Aegis, pulled out in May; Watkins Glen International speedway, followed last month.

As for what happens next? Organizers could refile, but that looks to be a fruitless attempt at this point. Certainly, litigation is forthcoming, but until the festival is officially canceled, the millions of dollars committed to performing acts remains in a holding pattern. But all that could change in the coming days as agents consider their options as they relate to their already-booked acts.

The judge in the $18 million lawsuit pitting the organizers of the troubled Woodstock 50 festival against their former finance partner, Dentsu Aegis, adjourned without a decision this afternoon and said he will take 20 to 36 hours to rule, a rep for the festival tells Variety. Dentsu is seeking an emergency injunction over nearly $18 million for the event, which is scheduled to take place at the Watkins Glen International speedway August 16-18 — just three months from now — but has yet to obtain the necessary permits, put tickets on sale or secure a new financial partner.

The lawsuit has grown bitter in recent weeks, as the former partners have harshly criticized each other in public statements. Lawyers for Dentsu slammed festival organizer Michael Lang in legal documents filed before the hearing began on Monday.

Referencing Dentsu’s investment arm, Amplifi Live, attorney Marc L. Greenwald wrote in part: “Amplifi Live worked nonstop for the last 10 months and invested millions of dollars to put on the Woodstock 50th anniversary festival in Watkins Glen this August.

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“But Woodstock 50 LLC’s and Michael Lang’s misrepresentations, incompetence, and contractual breaches have made it impossible to produce a high-quality event that is safe and secure for concertgoers, artists, and staff. The production company has quit, no permits have been issued, necessary roadwork has not begun, and there is no prospect for sufficient financing. As much as the parties might wish it otherwise, the festival contemplated by their agreement cannot happen and allowing it to go forward would only put the public at risk. The injunction sought by W50, even if there were a legal basis for it, cannot change that.”

Reached by Variety, a rep for the festival replied, “While Dentsu has used its filing to sling mud, nothing in its court papers changes the fact that Dentsu has no right under its agreement with Woodstock 50 to either cancel the Festival or abscond with nearly $18 million of the Festival’s money. We look forward to addressing that in court this afternoon.”

Last week, Lang wrote Dentsu a letter asking that the company “honor the law and your obligations, stop interfering with our efforts to put on this wonderful event and return the $17 million you improperly took.”

A rep for Dentsu-Aegis dismissed Lang’s claim that the money was taken illegally, saying in a statement provided to Variety: “As financial partner, we had the customary rights one would expect to protect a large investment. After we exercised our contractual right to take over, and subsequently, cancel the festival, we simply recovered the funds in the festival bank account, funds which we originally put in as financial partner. Further, tickets cannot go on sale for an event prior to obtaining a mass gathering permit, which has still not been granted. Beyond that we stand by our original statement that we made last week.”